They generally have a "liberal bias" as well...

I think I will use

I don't think they deserve all the adulation they are getting from liberals these days.

COINTELPRO anyone? (And don't be fooled, they are still spying on us today, especially if you are a protester).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

COINTELPRO (an acronym for COunter INTELligence PROgram) was a series of covert, and at times illegal,[1][2] projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic political organizations.[3][4] FBI records show that COINTELPRO resources targeted groups and individuals that the FBI deemed subversive,[5] including anti-Vietnam War organizers, activists of the Civil Rights Movement or Black Power movement (e.g., Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Black Panther Party), feminist organizations[citation needed], independence movements (such as Puerto Rican independence groups like the Young Lords), and a variety of organizations that were part of the broader New Left.

DU’ers aren’t ignorant, we know the history of the FBI.

However (Trump/Russia) is current, not historical. Page was involved with a Russian spy ring as early as 2013. Let’s not join the Trumpers and pretend this was “fabricated” by the evil FBI.

What I am concerned about mainly is keeping the actions of the FBI in context. Nowhere did I say they fabricated the evidence against Page. I am saying we should never trust the FBI. This is the same FBI that wrote a letter that potentially affected the outcome of the 2016 election.

That’s today’s context.

Mueller, Comey, nor Wray are J. Edgar Hoover. Trump Co is not some innocent either.

Wray was instrumental in taking down Enron.

Mueller and Comey stopped Ashcroft potential abuses during Bush admin

That's "you're either with us or against us" and that is some fascist bullshit.

Have a great weekend.

for some, virtue is situational.

Wray led the Enron investigation. Wray bad, Enron good

Because something something Wikipedia article on the history of the FBI between 1956 and 1971.

It is 2018 now. If you wanna make bad guys out of Wray and Mueller over something neither of them had any involvement in, I dunno what to tell you.

Other than:

Binary thinking sucks as does whataboutism

Alarimer posted a Wikipedia article about the actions of the FBI between 1956 and 1971. Used it as “whataboutism” to make claims about the FBI/Mueller investigation into Trump Russia.

You did a “me too” post endorsing his posts.

I’ll again remind you that this is 2018, Hoover is dead, and the actions of the FBI in 56 to 71 are not relevant to Trump_Russia investigation. Trump and Page aren’t victims.

They will be monitoring social media. They also have a fantastical view of black activists. And yet, do not have a similar view of white supremacists. All I am pointing out is the problematic history of the FBI and the fact they have not changed their stripes one bit.

https://www.thenation.com/article/the-fbi-is-setting-up-a-task-force-to-monitor-social-media/

https://www.brennancenter.org/blog/fbi-new-fantasy-black-identity-extremists

The history of the FBI is the history of surveillance and intimidation of black Americans that frequently goes beyond legitimate law enforcement into paranoia, racism, and political expediency.

This was true almost 50 years ago, when J. Edgar Hoover sent his loyal line officers into black communities to try to gin up evidencedesigned to convince one president after another that the civil rights movement was some sort of communist plot. It was true in the 1970s when the feds hounded those whom they perceived to be black separatists. And it is true today now that we know the FBI is promoting the hoary idea that something called “black identity extremists” poise a dangerous domestic terror threat, particularly to police officers.

Foreign Policy broke the news this weekend of an internal report, leaked to reporters of the respected journal, in which the FBI “assesses it is very likely that Black Identity Extremists (BIE) perceptions of police brutality against African Americans spurred an increase in premeditated, retaliatory lethal violence against law enforcement and will likely serve as justifications for such violence.” There has been a “resurgence,” the FBI wants us to believe, “in ideologically motivated, violent criminal activity within the BIE movement.”

Except there is no “BIE movement,” but in the fertile mind of those within the Trump administration who want you to believe there is some sinister black force out there bent on attacking police officers. No journalists or academics have discovered and chronicled such a movement or its leaders. No such leaders have come forward to say they are part of such a movement. No one has killed a cop in the name of such a movement. The only citations to the movement, the Foreign Policy piece tells us, come from internal law enforcement writings made over the past two months.

Meant to preserve democratic values nationwide. Yes, they do some evil things. The history of their surveillance centers around left wing groups and activities, which just so happen to be what we liberals held dear. We have memories of all the nefarious things they've done, but the pendulum has swung the opposite direction in the last few years. It is no longer the liberals who are the subversives. It is the alt right they need to worry about.

I see the FBI as staunchly conservative, but there is a line to the right they will not cross. I mean, holy hell, we pin all our hopes on Mueller, and he is a cog in the FBI apparatus. To say that he has changed sides in his current role would be disingenuous. So while we can be wary of the FBI in the way it handles liberal dissent, I think we can be cautiously optimistic of them in the way they deal with the far right.

I just don't believe the CIA, NSA, or FBI are overall forces for good and even most Democrats will not reign in their excesses, so we end up with even more of a surveillance state than before. It's ironic that liberals are all of a sudden lionizing the FBI when they are the ones that (arguably) threw the election to Trump in the first place.

This plan to monitor social media should worry civil libertarians. We know they have already been treating "Black Lives Matter" and antifa as terrorists.

https://www.thenation.com/article/the-fbi-is-setting-up-a-task-force-to-monitor-social-media/

No matter who is tasked with monitoring or regulating social media, serious concerns about free speech arise. Allowing Silicon Valley to self-police is to essentially entrust unaccountable corporations with regulating our modern public square. Congressional committees, while the most democratic form of oversight, can also have chilling effects on speech. Yet, whatever concerns may exist about these other bodies, the FBI is the worst possible candidate for the job.

Recent public comments indicate that the FBI will alert both private companies and the public to social media–based foreign influence in the upcoming election. It is then up to social-media providers and the public to decide how to respond. There doesn’t have to be state-mandated censorship for this system to threaten free expression. Allowing the nation’s top law-enforcement agency to designate speech as foreign disinformation is inherently chilling. The FBI itself seems aware of how bad this idea sounds like from a First Amendment standpoint. A FBI spokesperson proclaimed, “We’re not here to be the thought police. That’s obviously, clearly, not something that we would ever want to get into.”

Anyone familiar with the FBI’s own history knows that from its very inception the bureau has always sought out the role of thought police. J. Edgar Hoover got his start in the Bureau of Investigation’s Radical Division (also referred to as the General Intelligence Division), where he oversaw the Palmer Raids, a mass roundup of political radicals. After the Bureau of Investigation became the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover became its director, it would continue to devote significant resources to policing First Amendment–protected speech, such as its infamous COINTELPRO program, which sought to neutralize and disrupt political movements.

Critics will dismiss such concerns as being anachronistic or tantamount to holding the contemporary FBI responsible for the sins of the past. However, in spite of repeated attempts at reform, the FBI continues decade after decade, year after year, to engage in the same pattern of surveilling dissent. For example, the FBI’s use of its counterterrorism authorities in recent years has demonstrated a deep-seated political bias. The FBI has consistently monitored groups it conceded were nonviolent on the grounds that violent activists might someday overtake them. This could be true of any civil-society group, but the FBI doesn’t monitor just any group. It singles out for counterterrorism investigation groups like the anti-war School of the Americas Watch or the Occupy Wall Street movement. Just as was true in the time of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI has an institutional bias toward believing that movements for economic justice, racial justice, or peace are inherently suspicious. There is zero reason to believe that its social-media task force would not hold these same political biases.